Like Katherine Heigl discovered in the movie, The Ugly Truth, sometimes the truth isn’t always what we want to hear. But the truth usually leaves us feeling better off… doesn’t it? Well, Heigl’s character does get the man at the end of the movie, right? The truth is hard. What I’ve come to discover over the years is that people think they want you to be honest with them, but in actuality, they really don’t want to hear it. So that makes me think – do people just want you to tell them what they want to hear?
I have always prided myself in being an extremely honest person. If I think your hair looks bad or something doesn’t match, I’m going to tell you. If you have a piece of green lettuce in your teeth, I’m right there to protect you from further embarrassment. I have been this way in hopes that people will realize and act the same way towards me. But this is also where I’ve tended to get myself in trouble. More often than not, people just don’t want to hear it. Now, it’s not like I’m going to walk up to some random person on the street and tell them they look like complete crap, but I’m going to look out for my friends and the people I care about. But even so, sometimes the people who are closest to you really just don’t want to hear it.
And so I went on to search for the truth about honesty and what people really think about that dangerous word. Danielle Khattar, junior, said, “For me, with personal relationships and friends, being 100% honest is always best because if you have a strong, real relationship then there shouldn’t be a problem with being honest, especially if it’s not always positive. I am always honest with my best friends and significant others and because of that, I expect them to be honest with me as well.”
Out of the dozen or so people that I asked for an opinion on this topic, a huge majority said they would want to hear the honest truth, especially from their close friends. But that still leaves me feeling uneven. Are people just telling me what they think I want to hear? I feel like no matter how many people I survey or how many opinions I can get, there is always going to be a slightly large majority of people who aren’t exactly being honest with themselves, which leads me to my next point. Do people not want others to be honest with them because they can’t be honest with themselves?
Next, I asked people if either telling the truth or hearing the truth was worse. And I couldn’t really get a straight answer from anyone. One girl told me that the answer to my question was based on the situation at hand. What was this truth about? Was it something that someone already knew, but didn’t want to hear it said out loud? She went on to explain that my question had many different variables and none of them were necessarily wrong, but it differed from person to person based on the current situation. Variables, huh? That word stuck in my head. How does the truth have variables? Isn’t the truth just the truth? Apparently, not so much anymore.
No matter how much research I can do to try to answer this question the best way possible, I continuously find myself asking another question. Maybe there is no right answer. Maybe people are going to answer my question depending on how they feel that day or if they just had fight with one of their friends. I can say one thing for sure, there really is no right or wrong answer. Honesty is something that changes with every person you encounter in life. It’s definitely not something that is set in stone and I personally think that’s how it should be. As I think about it more and more, variables may have just been the perfect word to use. In trying to reach a conclusion to my many questions that are currently present, I have realized that not everything in life is always completely straightforward and simple. There are things in life that aren’t meant to have one right or one wrong answer, and honesty is definitely one of those things.